Election Party

Patrick Crozier, Michael Jennings and Brian Micklethwait are currently sat around my television discussing the election. We plan to stay here eating pizza and drinking beer for as long as we can stand. I will be posting some sort of running commentary in a hastily prepared chat room. If you want to join in, give yourself a username and leave the password blank.

It’s now 6:03 PM Eastern (US) time where I live. The first polls won’t close for an hour, and lots of important ones won’t close for another hour after that. And then you have to wait for enough results to come in for the pundits to “call” a result. By the time any of that happens you guys are going to be totally sh*t-faced!

I’d love to be having a single malt right now but I forgot that the liquor stores are closed here on election day by state law. After forcing yourself to vote for one of the useless candidates populating our government you just want to erase the memory of the dirty deed as fast as possible. I guess our legislature doesn’t understand that though.

I voted, by way of ignored and useless write-in, for he whom I said many months ago I would vote. Even as the scoreboards tick up their numbers, I find I have no regret not having a player on the tally. As the election result plays out, I’ll be trying to formulate a plan to continue the libertarian assault on “right thinking” people.

Thomas Jefferson had it right in opining that every government should suffer a revolution every few years or so. I do believe ours is ripe for one.

Agreed, Alan, but you should know that it’s not possible to write in a vote for president. You aren’t voting for the president; you’re voting for a slate of electors at the Electoral College. So if you managed to find a way to write in someone not on the official ballot (not even physically possible in my state) you completely wasted your time. Better to vote for one of the minor-party candidates; at least your vote would have been counted. Yours won’t even make the tally.

Quite right, laird. But there was a spot and I put his name in there. I couldn’t vote for one of the minor party people. I didn’t want them to be President.

At the end of the day, somebody will be President. It will turn out that he, or she, will be very much like the others before. The government will grow. More laws will be enacted and virtually no existing laws will be retired. Funding, great quantities of stolen and counterfeit money, will shift to different groups of rent-seekers. The term ‘morality’ will continue to be a political hammer wielded by those who have no notion of its meaning. And the formerly great American people will continue their slide into pathetic dependence on the gods of the Market.

The Gods of the Copy Book Headings wait, as always, for the right time.

I’m back home now. Thanks for the lift Rob (Fisher), hugely appreciated. Driving through London at 3 a.m. is quite an experience I can tell you. Weird, because almost entirely empty.

And it seems Michael Jennings was right, and I was wrong. Obama, as I go to bed, seems to have it. MJ has been telling us all for a month and more that this is what would happen, and it has. I can recall earlier US Presidential elections when I went to bed with the Dem winning it, only to wake up and learn that the Repub was winning it. But, the way everyone’s talking, it’s over.

First thought. The Obama campaign said they had a good ground game. I thought yeah, sure you do, but it seems they really did.

Even Connie Mack (a solid anti big government person) failed to win in Florida. The national vote is almost even – but an inch is as good as a mile.

“Begining of the end of Big Government”.

Perhaps – is you have a way that Texas (and so on) can peacefully secede.

For the “United States of America” is now owned by the left – the House of Representatives will be blamed for any economic problems (for not increasing taxes enough – sorry for “not making the rich pay their fair share”).

‘ . . . .the House of Representatives will be blamed for any economic problems (for not increasing taxes enough – sorry for “not making the rich pay their fair share”).’

and he put his finger on the crux of the problem.

Anyone who can do simple math can quickly tell that there aren’t enough rich people to solve our problems this way. If you taxed every single person in the US earning more than $250K pa from all sources at 100%, it would not stave off the coming fiscal trainwreck for more than about 6 months. And yet the President presented higher taxes on ‘the rich’ as his only definitive approach to the fiscal crisis that hangs over us – and the electorate went ‘Yeah, OK. Whatever.’ and went back to watching the Kardashian sisters.

We are completely, utterly and royally screwed – fiscally. We are the brokest nation in the history of broke. We are so far in the hole that if we were in a literal hole, our asses would be coming out of the ground in China. The combined indebtedness (now and future) of the US now far exceeds the entire amount of money in the world – and counting.

And the public went – ‘Meh.’

And electing Governor Romney would have made (at most) a difference of a year or two in the exact date at which we arrive at the fiscal Armageddon that we cannot avoid.

Both candidates realized (Romney later than Obama) that telling the electorate the truth about this was a sure-fire way to lose the election. Why do you suppose that Paul Ryan – the absolute King of the Wonks as far as the budget is concerned – all of a sudden stopped talking about it? So both decided to take a course that allows the electorate to shrug its shoulders and ignore the issue, and play small-ball politics for the cameras. Free contraception, Big Bird and windmills. And President Obama was able to paint the slightly-more attractive picture.

Somebody has already used the analogy of The Picture of Dorian Grey, but it is a perfect analogy so I will steal it. In the parlour, the two candidates were painting portraits, one slightly-less attractive than the other – but neither of them bearing even the slightest resemblance to the true portrait, which is up in the attic and more gruesome than anyone can possibly imagine. The public chose one of the downstairs portraits, but it doesn’t matter which one – the real one is in the attic and will be exposed soon enough.

Indeed not. But the Republican Party has up to now done a terrible job of courting their votes. Can the party as it is now change? (Of course, the Bushes were actually much better at courting Hispanics – in some cases very literally – than the present powers in the party.

Well, those blacks don’t have to vote for the socialist either, but they did.

When will libertarians wake up and realize that the ideology has somehow become almost the sole province of white males? Sure, there are exceptions – Thomas Sowell, myself, a scattered few others here and there, but by and large most other ethnicities are opposed to self-responsibility, self-regulation, and self-determination.

I don’t know why. Maybe it’s education, maybe it’s cultural upbringing. At the basest, most unspeakable, politically incorrect level, it could even be a genetic disposition. Lack of long term orientation, willingness to sacrifice short term gains for long term rewards, punctiliousness etc. You may call me a racist now.

Simply put – if Hispanics could be conservative, then Mexico wouldn’t be Mexico.

Well, I don’t see Mexico going conservative anytime soon. What makes you think you can make the hispanics in the US think otherwise?

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